The Iraq War Cheerleaders Were Wrong. They're Wrong About Iran Too.
Reason · RC · trust 52/100
So it went in Iran. Pro-war journalists and TV talking heads predicted that the Iranian government would collapse at the first push. Once the war started, they ignored signs that things were not going as planned. Unlike the Iraq War, the war in Iran has not turned into a drawn-out insurgency. The U.S. did not even topple the government, instead accepting a ceasefire after four weeks. But that ceasefire did not hold. At press time, the U.S. and Iran were fighting over the Strait of Hormuz, a key chokepoint for trade that had been fully open before the war.
Before the U.S. attacked Iran on February 28, a chorus of media personalities, including several with direct lines to President Donald Trump, argued that a war with Iran would last only a few days . Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen predicted that the Iranian government would quickly fall because "the Iranian people are the boots on the ground." Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told The Hugh Hewitt Show that Ali Khamenei, then Iran's supreme leader, would not fight back because "that's the end of his regime." Fox News host Mark Levin claimed Iran physically couldn't fight back.
Reza Pahlavi, the crown prince of Iran overthrown in the 1979 revolution, was frequently featured on Fox News as a pro-war Iranian voice. Although he had some support among Iranians, the suburban dad formerly known as prince was making wild promises he couldn't keep. In a February 12 interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel , Pahlavi urged U.S. intervention, claiming he had recruited an army of 100,000 defectors. Not a single uprising against the Iranian government happened during the war.
John Podhoretz, heir to the neoconservative magazine Commentary , at least admitted that his predictions fell flat. In the first hours of the war, he wrote that the U.S. military would leave "quick work for Iranians themselves to kick the mullahs to the curb." On a Commentary podcast four months later, he said "there is no person on Earth who is going to say that America didn't lose the war."
Other pundits simply refused to acknowledge when things were not going their way. Week after week, Fox News commentator Jack Keane said the war would be over in two or three more weeks. Many of these pundits' arguments were simply an appeal to shut up and trust the leader. In mid-March, retired British Army officer Richard Kemp complained in The Telegraph about an excess of "doom mongering." The media, he claimed, were simply "not privy" to the genius of Trump's plans.
On CNN a few days before the April ceasefire, former Bush administration official Scott Jennings said "there is no doubt we have defanged this regime." Zineb Riboua, a research fellow with the neoconservative Hudson Institute, complained a few days after the ceasefire that the West was ignoring the "lived experience" of Arabs, who she claimed supported the war. Public opinion polling from both before and after the war suggested that Arab publics were increasingly rooting for Iran and opposing the war. Riboua also claimed the war was "all about" weakening China by, among other things, eliminating a cheap source of oil. Three months after the ceasefire, China was snapping up discounted oil from Iran's rivals.
Soon after the ceasefire, Trump attempted to pressure Iran further by blockading its ports, and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies published a prediction that Iran would be forced to shut down its oil wells within 13 days, causing permanent damage. Trump repeated a similar timeline on Fox News, predicting that the wells would literally explode at the end of April. That didn't happen.
Many of the cheerleaders for war with Iran were the same people who had cheered on the invasion of Iraq, often with the same arguments. Fox News host Sean Hannity, who predicted in February 2003 that the Iraq War was "going to be over very quickly," said almost exactly the same thing in February 2026: "It's not going to be a forever war. It's going to be overwhelming military might and force, and then it's going to be up to the people of Iran. If they want a chance at freedom, they will have it, I believe, within the next few weeks." New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who bragged in 2023 about his lack of regrets about the Iraq War, whined in March 2026 about "our inability to appreciate the advantages we now possess."
There is a revolving door between hawkish punditry and government work. Benjamin Netanyahu, testifying before the U.S. Congress as a retired prime minister and private citizen in 2002, said invading Iraq would have "enormous positive reverberations." Netanyahu, who is once again the prime minister of Israel, helped Trump plan the Iran War . Back in 2002, Condoleezza Rice, then the U.S. national security adviser, was pushing the false claim that Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," she famously told CNN. In July 2026, Rice was invited to address the Aspen Security Forum about the new war in Iran. "When I hear, 'Well, it wasn't imminent,'" she told the crowd, "I think, 'Do you really want to wait until it's imminent?'"
Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us.
This article originally appeared in print under the headline "Pundits Got the Iran War Wrong."
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